Audio By Carbonatix
On a hot June night in 1991, two men in a Toyota inched through the streets of Liberty City. A riot was brewing and New Times staff writer Sean Rowe and reporter Rick Bragg, then with the St. Petersburg Times, wanted to see it firsthand. The impending violence followed news that a Miami cop convicted of manslaughter had had his conviction overturned. Two white guys on a dark street in a race riot make for a tempting target. Soon rocks started flying, then people tried pushing a disabled car in front of them to block their exit. Rowe gripped the wheel and gunned the engine. “I do not want to believe it, but I think we might have died there, if he had lost his nerve,” Bragg wrote in his book All Over but the Shoutin’.
“I am not a brave man, but I do my job,” Bragg continued. “I had heard of reporters who covered riots from their television sets. I may lose my nerve someday and do it myself, but at the time I knew I had to get close.”
Ah, the permanence of the printed page.
Bragg was a singularly successful journalist. He ended up at the New York Times, where he won a Pulitzer Prize. Shoutin’ became a best seller. After his stint in Miami for St. Pete, he returned here as a national correspondent for the Times. He was known as a stylist, a man who could squeeze magic out of a few words. And perhaps because of that skill he wasn’t known for working very hard at digging up his own stories. He was content to pluck from the local press.
Recently Bragg made headlines when he was suspended for sending a young freelancer into the field to do interviews for a story about oystermen in Apalachicola, Florida, then using those interviews and notes to write the story without crediting the freelancer. In his defense, Bragg told the Washington Post: “Most national correspondents will tell you they rely on stringers and researchers and interns and clerks and news assistants.”
Bragg didn’t suffer the loss of nerve he worried about in his book; he appears to have suffered a loss of drive — something that infuriated his colleagues at the Times. On May 28 he resigned.
It’s too bad. Bragg may have abused a Times practice of using uncredited contributors, but he didn’t violate any policies. He was undeservedly swept up in the hysteria of the Jayson Blair scandal. Blair is the former New York Times writer who admitted fabricating reporting trips, plagiarizing quotes, and concocting entire scenes that later appeared in the Gray Lady’s pages. Bragg’s sins had nothing to do with fabrication. He simply flaunted, then rested on, his talents. (Fallout from the Blair debacle also claimed top Times editors Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, who resigned last week.) Woe to the arrogant.
This is an extraordinary time for journalists. Blair was exposed just as his ink-stained evil twin Stephen Glass, who had out-fabricated Blair in The New Republic, Rolling Stone, and Harper’s, published a book about his misdeeds in novel form. At the tender age of 25 Glass made up entire fictions and passed them off as fact, including one about a group that worshipped at the First Church of George Herbert Walker Christ.
All of this has reached a crescendo just as the ink has barely dried on our own Miami Herald‘s tepid mea culpas for causing a national furor in journalism and horse-racing circles with an article that questioned whether a champion jockey used an illegal device to prod his horse to a Kentucky Derby victory. No such thing happened, the paper and race officials later concluded.
Now readers are getting an inside look at the often messy craft of story-making, a sausage factory of word and quote assemblage. It’s not pretty, but in all likelihood readers will be seeing even more of journalism’s working innards.
Newsrooms around the nation are currently waging a war to win back readers’ trust. Herald managing editor Mark Seibel cited the New York Times‘s problems when he issued a May 27 memo to staff intended to “make sure our readers know the source of the information they are reading.” Thus “quotes that are not given to a Herald reporter in a face-to-face interview should be explained. If the interview took place via e-mail, the story should say so.” Datelines: “A story should carry a dateline only if the reporting, or some portion of the reporting, was actually done in that location.” And contributors: “We should give a contributing line to any individual who contributed substantively to a story.” Seibel tells me (in a telephone interview) they are just tightening up existing practices.
To be honest, I care less that Rick Bragg had an eager young rookie do his legwork than I do about reading a well-told story — as long as it’s accurate. But now, it seems, we’re in for a period of bumpy daily prose in which a single paragraph will contain umpteen different attributions.
For New Times‘s purposes, “that kind of multiple attribution is unnecessary,” editor Jim Mullin tells me in a face-to-face interview in his office. Unless, of course, it’s important to the story (“Smith said from a prison telephone”) or could confuse the reader, Mullin adds. (I’m still in his office and he’s getting annoyed.) In truth, this paper practices a magazine-style journalism that values the flow of verrry long stories. We’re more susceptible to a Blair phenomenon — someone trying to slip through an outright lie. But who are we kidding? This is the provincial press; it would be pretty tough to get a whopper by both editors and readers.
Jayson Blair’s pathological affinity for fabrication is not a portent of some new journalistic plague. It was a freak aberration. But these episodes do underscore a problem — a newsroom culture of star-worship. Bragg got his feet stuck in the muck because he was a prima donna who was coddled by his bosses. Blair and Glass, meanwhile, snookered some of the nation’s best editors because they were the rising young stars of their day. They had pedigree, the right schools, the right internships, but no track record. Apparently coming from the Ivy League (Glass) or an internship at the Boston Globe (Blair) is more sexy than having worked your way up through small-town papers (I swear that’s not a chip on my shoulder, just bad posture), even though the latter leaves a trail of work that can be checked for veracity. Lately, though, the prospect of having that hip young thing on staff has been a strong lure for rumpled editors. Until now.
